


Good Summer

by gnimmish



Category: Ant-Man (Movies), ant-man and the wasp - Fandom
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-08
Updated: 2018-07-08
Packaged: 2019-06-07 09:02:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15215738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gnimmish/pseuds/gnimmish
Summary: Hope isn't falling in love with Scott. (Really. She isn't. Stop looking at her like that). But they have a good summer, anyway.[Set between Ant-Man and the events of Civil War, a look into Hope and Scott's relationship before Scott messed it up].





	Good Summer

 

Hope isn’t falling in love with him.

She’s really, truly not.

Scott is an idiot. He’s brave and kind and he makes her laugh but he’s _an idiot._ And a criminal. And he leaves his beard hairs in the sink when he shaves, and his toe nail clippings on the bathroom floor, and if she had to guess she’d say that he does laundry maybe once a month – given the state of most of his clothes.

And she’s not falling in love with him.

They have a good summer, though. After they defeat Cross. While Scott is trying to work out what exactly to do with his life now, and Hope is reconsidering everything she thought she knew about her father whilst confronting the very real possibility that her mom could be alive – there’s summer.

Later, when Hope thinks about that summer at all she remembers it accompanied by the sting of her annoyance that she was ever such an idiot – and later still, with a pang of almost embarrassing regret. And much, much later, after they retrieve her mother, after they defeat Thanos – she remembers it mostly as sunshine and the drowsy balm of the city in the mid-afternoon heat, the stick of her clothes to her skin and the smell of Scott’s aftershave.

She also remembers the sound of traffic from the tiny balcony off Scott’s shitty little apartment, where she’d sit in the lawn chair he’d dragged out of a skip to put there, her feet propped on the balcony railing, a notepad in her lap, a stack of files on the quantum realm under her chair.

In these memories there’s always the breeze off the park outside – the reason she works on the balcony, because his air condition’s barely worthy of the name and his apartment is now basically a sweat lodge. And Scott is always somewhere nearby – he brings her soda or ice coffee or water, and flirts with her until she agrees to take a break. He has Cassie over and Hope listens to them watching tv or making lunch. She has lunch with them sometimes. But mostly, he sits with her on the balcony just to keep her company.

At first he tries to read the files on the quantum realm, because he wants to try to grasp what she’s doing – but he goes bug-eyed over the first couple of pages and she takes pity on him.

“I’d have to teach you college level quantum mechanics before you even started on that,” she tells him. “Which means I’d probably have to teach you high school physics first.”

He pretends to be offended at that. “I have a masters degree in electrical engineering!”

“And how much particle physics did that require?”

“Some,” He wrinkles his nose at her and goes back to staring at the file like all that formulae and jargon is going to amalgamate into something he can make sense of by itself. “Quantum mechanics is just probabilities. It can’t be that hard.”

“Honey, I appreciate you trying to help, but I just don’t think this is your access point,” she tugs the file out of his hands, “you’re a strategist. Strategise – we need a plan as much as we need to know what we’re up against.”

And he just grins at her.

“What?”

“You called me _honey_.”

Hope rolls her eyes, even as she feels the blood rush up her neck to her ears. “Shut up.”

“You like me,” he jabs her in the ribs, sing-songing, “you really like me – ”

“Not right now I don’t.”

He kisses her on the cheek, and she pretends she’s too dignified to get flustered by him.

But his affection feels good. It always feels good. It feels good from the minute he starts flirting with her in their sparring sessions – it feels good the first time he kisses her and she thinks ‘oh, no.’ because she wants it to happen again, immediately, in spite of her dad interrupting them. It feels good sitting in her dad’s kitchen drinking beer and eating pizza after a late night, feeling Scott’s eyes on her.

“What?” It’s the start of the summer, she’s wiping pizza grease off her chin, it’s past midnight – they’ve left the back door open to let the air in and she can hear crickets in the grass outside. Her t-shirt smells of day-old sweat and her hair is frizzing from the humidity. Her bangs are getting in her eyes – she should have got them cut weeks ago but she hasn’t had time.

And Scott is watching her, and it’s making her feel – something.

He shrugs, smiles like he knows something she doesn’t. “Nothing.”

“ _What_?” She rolls her eyes at him, reaching for a napkin – he hands her one.

“You’re pretty. That’s all.”

She has no idea when it got okay for him to say stuff like that to her. But it’s been happening a lot recently. “Shut up.”

He kisses her, which has also been happening a lot lately.

That’s when they have sex for the first time, in the downstairs lounge. Because she refuses to do it in the kitchen.

“We eat in here!”

“Why do you care about food hygiene right now?” Scott is shirtless and breathless and touching her and she doesn’t want him to stop, she really doesn’t, but they are not having sex in the kitchen.

“Lounge,” she insists, “go, now.”

Besides there’s softer furniture in the lounge – which doesn’t stop Scott ending up with rug burn on his ass, but she takes that as a point of pride.

+++

In the haze of the summer that follows, it stays good. Hope doesn’t let herself think too hard, which probably helps. Not just about who Scott is as a person – the ex-con, unreliable, immature, terrified of intimacy and terrible at commitment – but about what a bad idea it is to be getting into something with someone she has to work with.

While she and her father are developing the new Wasp suit, Scott is their go-to if they need someone in a suit of any description. Given that he’s the only person to have gone into the quantum realm and come back out – despite how little of the experience he can remember – he’s also their closest link to Hope’s mom.

And now Hope’s sleeping with him.

Although, if she were pushed she’d admit that it’s more than sex – it’s… nice. Which in some ways is worse.

She finds herself spending the night at his apartment a couple of times a week – they sleep on top of the covers with a fan whirring, just about keeping them from boiling alive in their own juices. They talk, late, when the heat makes it impossible to sleep. She has a tooth brush and spare underwear at his place. He knows how she likes her coffee and keeps a supply of her favourite beer in the fridge.

Once, while he’s drowsing beside her some time in the small hours of the morning, she finds herself stroking the dark curls of hair back off his temple, tracing the shell of his ear with a finger tip – idle, but comfortable – intimate. And when he opens one eye he doesn’t even make fun of her for it – just smiles, still half-asleep, and buries his face on her shoulder.

That – things like that – are what is making this complicated. Because she _likes_ him. And he seems to like her.

It’d be hard to know for sure because Scott is the kind of guy who starts squirming the minute you try to have an genuinely emotionaly conversation with him (…not that she’s in any position to judge). But the first indication she gets is a midsummer morning when she’s over-slept after a late night at work and she’s having trouble peeling herself out of Scott’s bed as he gets up.

“I gotta pick up Cassie,” he tells her, as he leans down and kisses her. “I promised her breakfast.”

“Yeah,” she yawns, “don’t worry, I’ll be gone by the time you get back.”

“Oh, I mean – ” he pauses, in the middle of getting dressed, “you don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”

She props herself up on her forearms, not sure she’s heard him right. “No?”

“Nah,” he shrugs, pulls on a t-shirt, “I’ve told her all about you.”

“Oh.”

He takes her moment of awkward silence as hesitation. “You don’t have to stay, I’m just saying if you wanted to you could – ”

“No – no, it’s fine, I can stay, that’ll be nice – it’s nice,” she sits up properly, suddenly wide awake, and he grins.

“Great! I’ll be back in like an hour.”

He leaves, whistling.

And Hope knows he likes her. Because he wouldn’t tell Cassie about her if he didn’t – Scott’s entire personality is curled protectively around his daughter, she’s the one and only part of his life he’s consistently demonstrated real commitment to. To let anything – anyone – around her he has to be sure about how he feels.

It’s the first time that Hope’s certain that Scott is treating what’s between them as real. The idea settles warmly in her chest, alien but enticing.

+++

Within a couple of weeks, they’re in a routine. Hope spends her weekends at Scott’s and Scott brings Cassie over for breakfast on Saturdays. Technically, he has visitation every other weekend, but Cassie’s mom and step-dad seem to have relaxed lately – Scott has his daughter over most Saturday mornings, and picks her up from school and makes her dinner a few times a week. And it makes him radiantly happy, which Hope can’t help but appreciate. Even though it makes her nervous.

Because she’s getting to know Cassie, too, now – and sleeping with Scott is one thing, but having movie nights on the couch with his daughter is absolutely another.

“Hope! Hope!” Cassie pats the spot next to her on the picnic blanket, because they’ve decanted to the park to have lunch, “you want a cookie? I made them at school.”

She presents a box of mysteriously lumpy looking things that may or may not be cookies.

“She can’t have a cookie before she has a sandwich, peanut,” Scott corrects, briskly, “desert last.”

“You sound like Paxton,” Cassie pulls a face.

“Yeah, well, not all Paxton’s ideas are the worst,” Scott hands her a sandwich, “just hold off on the cookies, okay?”

“Okay,” Cassie grimaces – and Hope takes one of her cookies and pockets it, just to make the kid smile – and she does.

“Hope! Hope!” Cassie charges across Scott’s apartment and bursts onto the balcony where Hope is working – Scott has just picked her up from school, “we have to write a report about a famous female scientist, dad says you’re a scientist, can I write about you?”

“I said,” Scott puts his head out the balcony door, “that you could maybe ask Hope nicely – ”

“ _Please_ ,” Cassie is bouncing up and down and God she’s an adorable kid – also she looks uncannily like Scott when she smiles like that.

“I’m not what you’d call famous,” Hope replies, nudging the other chair on the balcony so that Cassie will take a seat and stop hopping like that, “maybe I can tell you about some others – like, Marie Curie or Ada Lovelace – ”

“Everyone’s going to write about them!” Cassie scrambles into the chair, a faintly familiar look of determination on her face – that’s the look Scott gets when he’s planning something ridiculous, “I wanna write about you!”

“Do you know what I do?” Hope asks, raising a questioning eyebrow at Scott over Cassie’s head.

“You’re a par-ti-cal phys-i-cist,” Cassie pronounces, carefully, “and a bio-chem-ical engineer. You know things about small things. Like the ant-man suit.”

“Yes,” Hope folds her arms, “though I don’t think you should put that in your report.”

“Pinky swear.”

+++

Hope develops a habit of working late into the night and sleeping through patches of the day whenever she’s not in her office at Pym Technologies – which is more and more frequently lately. The possibility of locating and retrieving her mother is tantalising, addictive. She can feel her father getting sucked into the obsession beside her. They’re too alike in a lot of ways. And they’re spending hours in his laboratory now, pouring over his work, arguing about ways forward.

Her own apartment is growing neglected as she shuffles back and forth between her childhood home and Scott’s place, which she doesn’t like – it’s a loss of a particular identity, though not one she’s sure she has much use for anymore. The carefully crafted persona of the estranged daughter of Hank Pym, leading particle physicist and chairman of the board of Pym Industries, ambitious, hard-headed, razor-smart and cold, is not one she occupies comfortably now.

But who does that mean she is, these days? Her father’s daughter? Scott Lang’s girlfriend? The idea of being defined in relation to the men around her rankles. She feels like a hermit crab caught between shells – one outgrown, a replacement not yet found, her too-soft flesh exposed.

She’s not falling in love with Scott – she really isn’t. And yet she wants to be around him more and more. Wants to train with him, talk with him, moan about her father or have him distract her with stupid jokes and pancakes and coffee. But to be so wrapped up in Scott feels impossibly dangerous. Because without her shell, he’s too close to her skin, somehow. And as he becomes her boyfriend, her partner, in every sense of the word, the risks bound up in losing him – if he leaves, if he lets her down, if he breaks her heart – grow exponentially.

Hope can’t countenance letting herself be so vulnerable to someone else, especially not _some guy_.

Sometimes she goes back to her place just to remind herself that she can – that she has somewhere that isn’t her dad’s house or her boyfriend’s tiny, sweltering apartment. Her air conditioning works properly, her shower has decent water pressure and her sheets are always fresh.

She works there, at night sometimes. It’s quiet. It’s cool. Though, increasingly, she turns the air conditioning off and opens a window to let in the slow heat of the night, the distant sounds of the city. She loses herself in her work, and lets that be her shell for a while.

Then Scott knocks at her door.

“It’s half midnight, Scott.”

He’s standing there with a bouquet of daisies and a bottle of her favourite wine, and Hope shouldn’t be charmed by such an obvious gesture, but she is.

“Yeah, and I figured since you’re up…”

“How do you know I’m up? I could have just got out of bed.”

“You’re always up,” he holds out the daisies, “these are for you. ‘Cause you’re pretty.”

Hope snorts, and takes them, and lets him in.

He doses on the sofa with his feet in her lap while she works – the daisies in a vase on her coffee table, the wine in the fridge. One of Scott’s socks has a hole in it, his big toe poking through. Hope tries to concentrate on the blueprints for the machine she and her father are building – there’s a hole in the mechanics of it somewhere, none of their prototypes are working properly, they’ve missed something –

Scott is snoring.

Hope gives his big toe a tweak and he wakes up with a start.

“—huh, what?” He blinks at her.

“Go to bed,” she tells him, “I’ll be done in a minute.”

“Yeah right,” he stretches then sits up, “what are you stuck on?”

Hope shakes her head, slowly. “I don’t even know. That’s the problem. There’s something wrong with these calculations but I can’t see it.”

Scott peers over her shoulder at her notes – a wall of text in her admittedly less than stellar handwriting – rubs his eyes and grimaces. “Jesus. You’re giving me a proximity migraine.”

“Go to bed, Scott.”

“Only if you come with me,” he reaches for her notes and she holds them out of his way with a scowl – they’ve danced this dance before. “Seriously, you can’t sit up all night working, you’ll drive yourself crazy.”

“I can do this,” Hope waves him off, “I’m close, I just need…”

“Sleep.”

“If I sleep I’ll lose my train of thought!” Hope lets out a huff of frustration, “I’m so close, I know I am, I just –  if mom were here I know she’d have figured this out by now.”

Scott’s silence is sympathetic – he lays a reassuring hand over hers. “Hope, you’re the smartest person I know, and I know your dad.”

Hope manages a dry smile. “But not my mom.”

“Still,” he nudges her, “we both know you can do this. The answer’s in there, somewhere.” He taps her temple with a fingertip, “you just gotta let it come to you. So maybe drilling down all the time isn’t all that helpful. Maybe you gotta… shake it up. See what surfaces.”

Hope sighs, casting him a sceptical look. “And how would you suggest I do that?”

His answer to that isn’t especially original, but it’s fun.

“You were right,” Hope sighs, contentedly, melting into the bed, her bare skin tacky with sweat. “That was a good idea.”

“ _I was right_?” Scott glances at her, feigning astonishment. “Can I get that in writing?”

“God no.”

Scott laughs.

+++

Cassie gets an A on her report, and Scott waves a copy of it in Hank Pym’s kitchen like a flag. “My kid’s a genius!”

“Hope’s a genius!” Cassie corrects – she’s standing on a chair, covered in frosting. They’re baking – or as close an approximation to baking as Scott and Cassie ever seem to get, which mostly seems to mean making a mess with the potential to get something edible out of that mess at some unspecified time in the future, “I am her _protégé_!”

This is a word Hope taught her, during the surprisingly involved process of report writing.

And Hope doubles over laughing because somehow a frosting-covered child and Scott Lang doing a wild victory dance in her father’s kitchen is the funniest thing she’s ever seen. It’s certainly the best thing to have happened in this kitchen in a while (…she is doubly glad she refused to have sex in here).

Scott asked to bring Cassie over a few days ago – she wants to bake a secret birthday cake for her mom, apparently, but Scott’s oven is only half-way reliable and his kitchen is really just an open cupboard in the back of his den.

“Your dad’s place is just gonna be easier,” he’d looked a little shy about it, “I mean, I know the old guy might not want some kid messing up his stuff but – ”

“I’ll talk him into it,” Hope replies, firmly.

“You’re amazing.”

As it turns out, though, Hank only grunts, tersely, when Hope asks him – and since that’s not an outright ‘no’, Hope gleans it for the permission that it is and suggests Scott brings Cassie round for an afternoon next weekend.

They arrived with Scott holding the fated science report over his head, pretending to blow a fanfare as he announces Cassie’s A – Cassie is holding a bag of groceries that seem to be mostly neon shades of food colouring.

Hank doesn’t emerge from his office. If he feels any sort of way about the entirely alien presence of a happy child in his home, he has nothing to say about it.

Hope sits at the kitchen table, pretending to work – mostly watching Scott be a father, out of the corner of her eye.

Scott sweeps Cassie up and dances with her around the room, spinning her until she makes him stop because she’s giddy, and depositing her, in fits of giggles, on the table in front of Hope. And then Scott does the same with Hope, pulling her from her chair, one arm around her waist, his body sturdy and warm against hers. He’s spattered with flour and powdered sugar, which is now getting on Hope’s clothes, and the exaggerated waltz he drags her on around the kitchen is embarrassing and ridiculous.

Hope shouldn’t be enjoying this. But she wraps her arms around Scott’s neck and for a moment lets herself feel safe, happy, wanted.

She doesn’t know that her dad must have been watching them until later, when he gives her a thoughtful look over a cup of tea in his office.

“Scott makes you happy.”

She’s so used to arguing with him that she almost denies it out of habit. Having this new dynamic with Hank where she doesn’t have to constantly brace herself against criticism or rejection is proving difficult to adjust to.

“Yes,” she sips from her teacup, carefully avoiding his gaze.

“Good. That’s good.”

He doesn’t say anything else.

+++

The first of a series of summer storms rolls across the sky that night.

Hope wakes in her childhood bedroom, late that night, to the crack of thunder in the distance, through the open window.

Scott is stirring beside her, eyes blinking half open and slow – the bed is really too small for them both, but after he’d dropped Cassie back at her mom’s he’d come back to clean up Hank’s kitchen and stayed up talking with Hope until it was too late for him to feel like driving home. He’s stayed here with her a few times now, though it still feels strange, to let him in somewhere so intimately connected to her history.

The rain brings with it the crisp smell of damp air and eucalyptus. The temperature has dropped a few degrees. Scott rolls lazily onto his side, toward her, laying an arm across her stomach. Another thunder clap, closer this time, brings a heavier ripple of rain.

“I should close the window,” Hope murmurs, conscious of droplets beginning to spatter the sill and the floorboards below.

Scott shakes his head, muzzily. “Leave it.”

Hope folds herself toward him, letting her body fit against his, the old tank top she sleeps in riding up as he slides his hand beneath it, one of her legs slipping between his – he kisses her, slow and tender.

It’s the first time it’s been cool enough for them to have sex at night, almost since the first time they did it. Mostly, sex has become a morning-based activity – in the shower at her place (his isn’t big enough) or on his couch with the fan on or, on one memorable occasion, directly on top of an air conditioning unit.

The lightening illuminates them in patches as she straddles him, catches his warm, sleepy smile so she can kiss it, throws light across her bare skin where he touches her. They wrap themselves around each other, and Hope wants it to last, wants to keep him here with her like this, wants to believe they can keep going for ever.

“You’re incredible, you know that?” He says it into her hair, his breath still rapid in his chest as they come down, bathed in the heat of each other – outside, the rain is easing.

“I know,” she yawns, pressing her face into his neck. “Say it again.”

“You are,” he kisses her, “incredible.”

“Good night, Scott.”

“Good night, honey.”

 

 


End file.
